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Chances are you listen to the phrase bitcoin mining and your mind begins to wander to the Western fantasy of pickaxes, soil, and striking it rich. As it turns out, that analogy isnt too far off.
Far less glamorous but equally uncertain, bitcoin mining is done by high-powered computers which solve complex computational math problems (read: so complicated they cannot be solved by hand). The fortune and work demanded by a computer to solve one of those problems is the equivalent of a miner striking gold in the ground while digging in a sandbox.
The result of bitcoin mining is twofold. To begin with, when computers solve these intricate math issues on the bitcoin networkthey create new bitcoin, not unlike when a mining operation extracts gold from the ground. And second, by solving computational mathematics problems, bitcoin miners make the bitcoin payment network dependable and protected, by verifying its transaction information. .
Theres a fantastic chance all that only made so much sense. In order to explain how bitcoin mining works in greater detail, lets begin with a procedure thats just a little bit closer to home: the regulation of printed currency.
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Consumers tend to anticipate printed currencies, at least in the United States. Feeling because the U.S. dollar is backed with a central bank called the Federal Reserve. In addition to a host of additional responsibilities, the Federal Reserve regulates the production of new money and prosecutes the use of counterfeit currency. .
Even electronic payments using the U.S. dollar are backed by a central authority. When you make an online purchase using your debit card or charge card, by way of instance, that transaction is processed by a payment processing company like Mastercard or Visa. In addition to recording your transaction history, those companies verify that transactions are not fraudulent, and that's one reason your credit or debit card could be suspended while traveling. .
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is not regulated by a central authority. Instead, bitcoin is endorsed by millions of computers throughout the world called miners. This network of computers performs the same function as the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, but with a couple of key differences. Like the Federal Reserve, Visa, and Mastercard, bitcoin miners record transactions and check their accuracy.
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When someone makes a purchase or sale using bitcoin, we call a transaction. Transactions generated in-store and online are documented by banks, point-of-sale systems, and physical receipts. Bitcoin miners achieve the same effect without these institutions by clumping transactions together in blocks and adding them to a public record known as the blockchain. .
When bitcoin miners add a new block of transactions to the blockchain, part of the job is to ensure that these transactions are accurate. (More on the wonder of how this happens in a second) In particular, bitcoin miners be sure that bitcoin are not being reproduced, a unique quirk of digital currencies called double-spending.
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Once you spend $20 at the shop, that bill is in the clerks hands. With electronic currency, nevertheless, it is a different story. .
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If the numbers were identical, then the clerk could know the money had been replicated. This analogy is very similar to what a bitcoin miner does when they confirm new transactions. .
With as many as 600,000 purchases and sales occurring in a single day, however, verifying every one of these transactions can be a lot of work for miners, which gets at one other key difference between bitcoin miners and the Federal Reserve, Mastercard, or Visa. As compensation for their efforts, miners are awarded bitcoin whenever they add a new block of transactions to the blockchain.
In 2009, it had been 50. In 2013, it had been 25, in the time of writing it's 12.5, and sometime in the middle of 2020 it will halve to 6.25. .
At this rate of halving, the total number of bitcoin in circulation will approach a limit of 21 million, making the currency more scarce and precious over time but also more costly for miners to produce.
Here's the catch. In order for bitcoin miners to really earn bitcoin from verifying transactions, two things must occur. To begin with, they must confirm 1 megabyte (MB) worth of transactions, which can theoretically be as little as 1 transaction but are far more often several thousand, depending on how much data each transaction shops.